From October 19 to November 25, 2026, the Robert Simon Fine Art gallery in New York is dedicating an exhibition—titled *La prima* (The First), as she is considered the first Florentine woman to achieve fame as a painter—to Sister Plautilla Nelli, a pioneering figure in 16th-century Florentine painting.
The exhibition features works for sale and on loan from private American and European collections, bringing the art of this extraordinary artist outside of Florence for the first time. Sister Plautilla Nelli (Florence, 1524–1588), a nun and painter, whose work even caught the attention of Giorgio Vasari, who reserved a brief but significant tribute for her in the second edition of *The Lives of the Artists* : “She produced some works so well that they aroused the admiration of artists.”
